Attracting rich foreigners to poor countries
By Serge Kreutz
More than anything else, attracting rich foreigners to poor countries is a business model for local elites. Poor countries nowadays have a competitive edge in trading freedom. It is something local elites in poor countries can sell to rich people in developed countries where freedom gets ever more curtailed.
Local elites can sell life in save enclaves of not-so-safe countries if at the same time there is a high degree of personal freedom, or absence of liberty-restricting law.
This doesn’t have to benefit local poor populations, or if, then only on an alibi level. It’s not about local or national development.
In the world today, a if the elites of a poor country want to attract foreign money, they may consider attracting foreign people with money.
If local elites make a country as attractive as ever possible to rich foreigners, they will come, even if it costs them more money than being somewhere else. After all, money is what they have, and they can’t take it with them when they die. Therefore, the idea is to be an attractive destination, and then to let them pay substantially for being there.
The idea is not new. Switzerland, which some 200 years ago was one of the poorest countries of Europe, thrived on it when it became a favorite destination of the rich from imperial powers such as England and France. And in Switzerland, they are, until today, more concerned about attracting rich foreigners, rather than the factories owned by rich foreigners (they don’t mind the offices, though).
But more can be done to attract rich foreigners than what the Swiss have practiced for more than a century. Something, which, on the other hand, would have made little sense some 100 or 200 years ago.
A country that in today’s world wants to draw rich foreigners should not just be attractive, but sexually attractive. This recommendation would have been meaningless some 100 or 200 years ago because much of the world was anyway not sexually regulated to the extent it is today.
Yes, in Victorian Britain (and in Britain ever since), sexual conduct was regulated to a considerable extent. And yes, of many Islamic communities even centuries ago, the same can be assumed. But for much of the rest of the world, sexual conduct, as long as it was not violent, was of little interest to governments.
This doesn’t mean that these societies would have been sexually free-wheeling. While there were fewer government-issued limitations, nature imposed hers in the form of hardship and disease, and a low level of self-cognition meant that people where restricted by beliefs in gods and ghosts.
Today governments concern themselves with the marriage and divorce behavior of citizens, and with whether a married person can have sex with somebody else. Governments also regulate whether people who are old enough to enjoy sex should be allowed to do so, or which age discrepancy constitutes a criminal act. Governments also go to great length evaluating the conditions under which people who have a sexual relationship exchange material items.
And furthermore, government policies in more and more countries undermine the privacy of sexual relationships, actively by spying on citizens and passively by allowing unrestricted press coverage of people’s private lives, thus inciting sexuality-based hatred on a mass scale.
Hand-in-hand with all the above goes the erosion of the sovereignty of more and more smaller countries. Not only do larger Western countries pass and enforce ever more extraterritorial laws dealing specifically with sexual conduct; the police forces of Western countries also are to an ever larger degree directly involved in prosecuting in poorer countries those of their citizens who break the law of the country whose passport they hold, and not necessarily the law of the country where they are prosecuted.
A business model for local elites in poor countries could be to attract comparatively wealthy foreign residents by providing an environment that is best suited for optimal sexual experience. Wealthy foreign residents could pay substantially for the privilege of being there.
The country should not be a direct democracy where envy towards rich foreign residents could be exploited by local populists.
Agents of moral imperialism should not be allowed to operate within the country: no foreign NGOs, no UN, and no foreign police.
The press should be kept under control. The press should be held responsible for unfavorable social conditions it causes by irresponsible reporting.
Permits to stay for foreigners involved in religious activities should not be renewed.
Apart from the legislation on violent sexual legislation should be kept at a minimum. No perversities of the law, such as “statutory rape”. This doesn’t mean that every behavior that is currently classified as statutory rape should be legalized. But the law should use a terminology that describes a sexual transgression (if the behavior is defined as a transgression) as what it is: “consensual sexual relationship with…. ” sound very different from “rape” even though the laws of many Western countries no longer differentiate between the two.
Allowing marriages at a local registrar without requiring any information but the names of the two people who want to get married would be attractive.
Allowing divorces by any party appearing before the registrar and stating the wish that a previously registered marriage be divorced, woyld be attractive, too.
All necessary measures to ensure sexual health within the population increases a country’s overall attractiveness. For governments that have the will to do so, the technologies are readily available to keep sexual diseases at almost zero-level.
All birth control methods could be made available free of charge. Other health care must not be free.
No commercial nightlife (brothels, night clubs, sex bars) sould be allowed. They would not attact foreigners of quality, but onky lowbrows. But other entertainment venues where people can mingle and start sexual relationships should not be restricted.
No artificial limitations on the extent to which men and women engage in sexual relationships for material benefits are needed. It is natural that in a sexual relationship, the wealthier partner provides material support for the less wealthy partner.
The business model outlined here should make it easy, but expensive for foreigners to become permanent residents.
Foreigners could be allowed to run businesses on low flat taxes categorized by the kind and the size of a business.